Carnivalesque for September

One of the great things going around the internet are Blog Carnivals.  These posts travel from blog to blog every so often, bringing new traffic to the host site and allowing people to find out about all the recent events and posts having to do with a specifici topic.

This month, I am happy to bring Archaeoporn back to life with the Sptember edition fo Carnivalesque, the pre-modern history blog carnival.   This edition will focus on ancient and midevil articles from accross the web.  Without further ado, I will jump right into the links for this month….

First up, we have an article from Smithsonian.com, asking about the nature of Vikings and their ships.

Reducing the sail to a minimum, the crew sailed on at nine knots. As the ship plowed from wave to wave, a full third of the Sea Stallion’s hull was often out of the water. Ahead lay the Isle of Man, 15 hours away.

Next up, we have the first of a number of pieces on language.   Richard Nokes over at Unlocked Wordhord has put together a syllabus for students and blog readers to follow his class and learn about Old English.

Classes won’t begin until the middle of August, but if you’re thinking of following along, you’ll need to order your books.

The Old English Newsletter has a piece by Mary Kate Hurley, discussing the effects of blogging on her work.

Through Old English in New York and now In the Middle, I have found a community of scholars with similar interests, who want to provoke and participate in discussions about the work we do. I would suggest that a part of what is gained in the blogging community is not simply a chance to think aloud on one’s own topics, but to be affected by each others’ work.

Over at Aphorisms and Paradoxes, there is a somewhat surprising post, which will lead us all to wonder what it means to be modern.

It is odd to think of flagellating monks and Canterbury pilgrims regarding themselves as modern.

Now, jumpting to the topic of stories, Philobiblon has a post on the story of Abeland and Heloise, and how it relates to the practice of ordaining women.

The story of Abelard and Heloise is normally told as a great love story, a sort of medieval Romeo and Juliet. But there was much more to the story – Abelard was a rebel, and perhaps surprisingly a proponent of women’s ordination, at least in some forms.

If you are able to get to A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, there is a ost titled “Love Stories in Charter Evidence”.

You see, there once was a man, a mighty man who was named Sal·la. He was a vicar, which here means an officer who holds the place of the count at some castle or other, a fiscal representative.

At the wonderfully named blog, Ruminate, there is a more general discussion of unfamiliar literature, and the use of a name…

Could the lack of either name contribute to a theory of the poem’s date before the prominence of these figures–as pre-Conquest, even pointing to a date in the first decade of the 11th century

Finally, Quid Plura, offers a piece discussing modern epic poems in the context of the old.

Balkan epic poems are a gift to the world. Early in the 20th century, recorded performances of epics such as The Wedding of Smailagić Meho helped a generation of scholars better understand the compositional techniques behind Beowulf and other medieval works, and the surviving fragments of the Kosovo cycle are tinged with wistful eloquence. The stories they tell are exciting and sad—but these songs can’t be sung in a vacuum.

Got Medieval has a wonderful piece discussing our definitions of the Middle Ages, through short lists of basic concepts.

Looking at what you all had to suggest,* it looks like the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth, and by far the most popular were the twelfth and thirteenth, with a smaller cluster of entries in the ninth century. Lots of your concepts were transcenturial, of course, and others weren’t datable at all.

We can now head back to A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, and look a a broad and interdisciplinary look at vegetable bartering. I am certainly glad to see anthropologists making an impact.

Keen readers may have noticed I’ve been talking with an anthropologist about their stuff and parallels from my stuff. This is after all what the humanities are supposed to be about, isn’t it, or at least wouldn’t it be nice if, and so on. In case you don’t believe me, here is a small revelation such a conversation brought me, which may be terribly obvious to you but I give it just in case not.

Over at the Anglo-Saxon Archaeology Blog, we get some more anthropology, which comes in the form of archaeology, of course.   Apparently, a “couple” found burried together may have been more than it seemed at first..

…the discovery has left experts with a 1,000-year-old mystery.

For a little more archaeology and a bit more of the ancient too, we can turn to Aardvarchaeology, where we find a summation of the author’s recent excavation.

Many functionally anonymous pits, many hearths and a few postholes, all probably dating from the centuries around AD 1. Radiocarbon will tell. The only identifiable structure among them is a line of six apparent fence posts. No datable artefacts.

An additional point of scholarly information comes to us from the Ancient World Bloggers Group, which offers a record of recent North American discertation on the ancient world.  Be sure to check it out for things that might interest you.

Finally, TimesOnline offers an article about the ancient Olympics, and compares them to the modern games…

But were the ancient games much better? Were the ancient Greeks up-standing and honest sportsmen, honouring the gods rather than their own ambition?

Head over to get the answers to these questions.

So, that’s it for this instilation of Carnivalesque, fo find out about future carnivals, or to volunteer to host, head over to the main site here.  Thank you for everyone who contributed, and all the readers who came by to check out the past as we’ve written it.

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